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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Columbia SDS Memories Revisited: Discovering IDA, 1967--Part 3

After completing the research paper, I wrote a folk song condemning both Columbia’s complicity with the Pentagon and U.S scientists who immorally served the U.S. war machine. The folk song, patterned somewhat after Dylan’s “Masters of War,” was titled “Bloody Minds” and contained the following lyrics:

Come, you bloody mindsLook what I done findI done did researchIDA existsLaugh between your wallsSit behind your desksWatch your missiles fallIDA exists.The value-free schoolYour mask we see right throughThe weapons of the PentagonTheir brains procured by you.Godly Grayson KirkOn the board he knitsSmokes upon his pipeWhile his bombers biteProblems he assigns:“How to make men die?”Professors they planDeath for Viet Nam.In ’56 to serve DefenseFive schools they did combineFour years laterColumbiaIt joined the bloody minds.

City slums they rotPeople live in lotsAtoms to destroyThey’re your little toysOh, they pay you wellTo create a hellDid you see the news?Twelve women they slew.

A divisionIts name JasonIn summer they studyThey meet, they talkThey plan, they plotCounterinsurgency.Lovers they must partLamps they now are darkKnowledge turned to swordsKirk sits on the boardSchools changed into gunsFor the PentagonStudents now they learn:How to make kids burn.You stand in classYou spout your factsA noble scientistBut then at nightYou join the fightYou do secret research.Murder poor peasantsWith the tools you sentOrphan thin childrenHelp the bastards winKill them with your mindParalyze their spinesSomeday you will dieAnd in slime you’ll lie.

Prior to March 1967, IDA had rarely been mentioned in the U.S. Establishment mass media or in the left, underground or campus press. A few Establishment magazine articles on IDA had appeared between 1956 and 1967 and IDA had been mentioned in a few books for academic specialists published by university presses. But the New York Times had barely acknowledged its existence. The Rand Institute, not the Institute for Defense Analyses, was the military-oriented think-tank that had received most of the Establishment mass media publicity prior to March 1967. After March 1967, IDA began to receive more mention in the Columbia Daily Spectator and in left newspapers and magazines like New Left Notes, the Worker, the [U.S.] Guardian and Viet Report. But the U.S. Establishment’s mass media still refused to mention IDA. After my name appeared in some leftist publications in reference to the Columbia-IDA revelation, the FBI opened a file on me and started to investigate me using information provided by the Columbia University Registrar’s Office, according to my de-classified FBI files.

Columbia’s IDA affiliation came to also symbolize the degree to which Columbia University’s research budget was dependent on receiving Pentagon basic and unsolicited research contracts. Like most elite U.S. universities, Columbia was dependent on corporate research funds and Pentagon research funds for financing much of its institutional research activity.